Stephen Johnson - Emergence - The Connected Lives...

This book provides a handy bridge between the Diary blog and the Dragon blog. The Dragon blog is getting bogged down with notes on the way the world works (assuming Dragon Theory) but it's short on providing a theoretical foundation for the theory. "Emergence" has always been assumed but rarely clearly connected with appropriate documentation to related work.

Johnson's detailed treatment of the emergent "mind" of an ant colony is a great jumping-off point to introduce the concepts underlying Dragon Theory. Johnson plays with a number of other emergent systems that are based on "human" components (such as the city). His examples are a bit muddled and he doesn't make his point very clearly. "Dragon" examples would work better, such as:

• Self-structuring of language to create a structured universe of related "memes"
• Self-structuring of the economy around the shared idea of money
• Self-structuring of society itself around armies, war and "defence"

For example, the armies of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Hitler bear striking resemblance to each other in structure. Societies based on hereditary kingship are another example.

It's interesting to ask whether our current "civilization" is in some final "emergent" stable structure or perhaps in the midst of chaotic transition to something else. For example, is "socialism" a truly emergent structure of society or something that exists or could exist only in theory?

The theory of emergent structures puts the "Dragon" theory of "assimilation" in its place. The exact way we are "assimilated" is not entirely irrelevant, but the resulting structure is what really matters. For example, people are "assimilated" into corporate culture or drafted into armies by quite different means but the resulting structures are remarkably similar.

Johnson's  sets out to show that the Internet is not a kind of "mind", but he's wrong on every level, from the details of how it works and the supposed lack of emergent structure. His discussion is valuable, however, in that he points out the features one would expect of an emergent structure, all of which he fails to see but all of which are actually present. In line with my remarks on Dennet, it would be useful to ask this question again with a workable definition of a "mind". 

Thanks to ground laid by Dennet, we can separate the question of "mind" and "self" from the question of "consciousness". Our idea of M-mind allows for a sliding scale of "mind" that goes all he way from zero to human and perhaps beyond while leaving aside the question of whether, for example, it "feels like something" to be the Internet. When discussing the Internet, we can look for the uniquely infinite and self-referential qualities that distinguish the human mind and perhaps should define what we mean by "mind" in the first place.

Finally, "emergence" seems to be the bridge that can unite the two subjects since "mind" and "self" can be seen as emergent properties of the brain (or not) and the surrender of individual human life to "society" can be seen as an emergent property of society.